IF YOU'RE THINKING OF LIVING IN STS / A Guide for the Perplexed / David E. Hess Citation: Hess, David J. 1998 “If You're Thinking of Living in STS....A Guide for the Perplexed.” In Gary Downey and Joe Dumit (eds.), Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Pp. 143-164. This version may have some differences from the final, published version. This paper grew out of a workshop at the School for American Research, which had produced the Writing Culture volume a decade earlier. So there was some expectation that the seminar might help to define what an anthropology of science and technology could be, especially in distinction from and in conversation with what was called the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., laboratory studies, controversy studies, and actor-network studies). At that time anthropologists were becoming very interested in the study of science and technology, but they did not know much of the STS field. This has changed, I think, during the subsequent decades. I was a founder member of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science and Technology, and at that time my identity was much more of an anthropologist, but over time both the field changed and I changed. I became drawn more to the political sociology of science and technology, which I think retains the similar critical approach to social inequality and power as anthropologists but does so with more attention to a social scientific methodology. I think the convergence of STS and anthropology during the 1990s tended to be temporary, and after that the two fields tended to drift apart. However, I also think that the engagement with anthropology tended to have a lasting impact on STS, such as the increased concern with publics, politics, and expertise. This paper was written as a kind of “anthropology of STS,” but the volume as a whole was also designed as a cross-over book that would be used in graduate education, so there is an element of combining the genres of textbook and ethnographic monograph. I have resisted rewriting but have added comments instead. DH CULTURAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES of science and technology in the United States have become something of a growth industry in the 1990s. The list of North American anthropologists interested in science,
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IF YOU'RE THINKING OF LIVING IN STS / A Guide for the Perplexed / David E. Hess
Citation: Hess, David J. 1998 “If You're Thinking of Living in STS....A Guide for the Perplexed.” In Gary
Downey and Joe Dumit (eds.), Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences
and Technologies. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Pp. 143-164.
This version may have some differences from the final, published version.
This paper grew out of a workshop at the School for American Research, which had produced the
Writing Culture volume a decade earlier. So there was some expectation that the seminar might help to
define what an anthropology of science and technology could be, especially in distinction from and in
conversation with what was called the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g., laboratory studies,
controversy studies, and actor-network studies). At that time anthropologists were becoming very
interested in the study of science and technology, but they did not know much of the STS field. This has
changed, I think, during the subsequent decades. I was a founder member of the Committee on the
Anthropology of Science and Technology, and at that time my identity was much more of an
anthropologist, but over time both the field changed and I changed. I became drawn more to the
political sociology of science and technology, which I think retains the similar critical approach to social
inequality and power as anthropologists but does so with more attention to a social scientific
methodology. I think the convergence of STS and anthropology during the 1990s tended to be
temporary, and after that the two fields tended to drift apart. However, I also think that the
engagement with anthropology tended to have a lasting impact on STS, such as the increased concern
with publics, politics, and expertise. This paper was written as a kind of “anthropology of STS,” but the
volume as a whole was also designed as a cross-over book that would be used in graduate education, so
there is an element of combining the genres of textbook and ethnographic monograph. I have resisted
rewriting but have added comments instead. DH
CULTURAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES of science and technology
in the United States have become something of a growth industry in
the 1990s. The list of North American anthropologists interested in science,
technology, and computing issues now includes more than two
hundred names.1 The topic is covered in growing numbers of panels on the programs
of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Social
Studies of Science as well as in a burgeoning number of publications. Yet anthropologists
and their siblings in cultural studies who move into this area
sometimes assume that they will be living in a remote village that no one else
has ever studied. It does not take long before they begin bumping into others
who claim authority as students of science and technology and who may also
expect anthropologists to prove that they have something new or interesting to
say. In this essay I provide in somewhat idiosyncratic terms a partial map of STS
(science and technology studies) that focuses on researchers and research likely
to be of interest to readers of this book.
The discussion takes the form of a critical literature review, but it is rooted
in several years of field work. As an anthropologist I have done fieldwork among
Spiritist intellectuals in Brazil and various alternative medical and scientific
groups In the United States, and in the process I have negotiated theories and
frameworks from the social studies of science and cultural anthropology. I have
also lived for the better half of a decade in one of the leading departments of science
and technology studies in the United States, where I have negotiated the
interdisciplinary intersection of anthropology with STS. As a result, I can offer a
perspective of both "insider" and "stranger."
1
STS and SSK
"STS" is usually taken to mean science, technology, and society studies, although
on occasion it is glossed as science and technology studies[h1]. At Rensselaer
and some other schools the faculty tend to think of STS as an interdisciplinary
field with constituent disciplines in the anthropology, cultural studies, feminist
studies, history, philosophy, political science, rhetoric, social psychology, and sociology
of science and technology. In North America STS is organized at a professional
level around a number of disciplinary societies, each with its own
acronym and affiliated journal. Among the major organizations are the History[h2]
of Science Society (HSS, Ms), Philosophy of Science Association (PSA, Philosophy
of Science), Society for the History of Technology (SHOT, Technology and Culture)
Society for Literature and Science (SLS, Configurations), and Society for Social
Studies of Science (4S, Science, Technology, and Human Values). Usually the societies
hold their annual meetings separately, but occasionally two or more convene
for joint meetings. There is also a Society for Philosophy and Technology
with an annual volume titled Research in Philosophy and Technology, and in 1993
yet another organization was formed, the American Association for the Rhetoric
of Science and Technology (AARST). That list covers only the major North American
organizations. Probably the most relevant institutions for social scientists
outside North America are the European Association for the Study of Science
and Technology (EASST) and the European (but not EASST) journal Social Studies
of Science.
My forthcoming book (Hess 1997b) provides an overview of some of the
key concepts in the major constituent disciplines of STS, including the philosophy
of science, the Institutional sociology of science, the sociology of scientific
knowledge, critical/feminist STS, and cultural/historical studies of science
and technology. There are also several other reviews of various aspects of the interdisciplinary
field (Fuller 1993; Rouse 1991, 1996b; Webster 1991; Woolgar
1988b; the review articles in Jasanoff et al. 1994). Traweek (1993) has provided
perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the field for those interested In anthropological,
feminist, and cultural studies in the United States.
In this essay I will focus on the particular branch of STS known as the
"sociology of scientific knowledge" (SSK), its relations to anthropology and
ethnography, and the role of anthropology and cultural studies in shaping the
future of the interdisciplinary STS dialogue. Given the prominence of SSK in this
dialogue, it usually is not long before a newcomer encounters its texts and
members. Furthermore, because there is a tradition of "anthropological" or
"ethnographic" studies within SSK, it should be of particular Interest to anthropologists.
The "core set" of SSK members, according to Malcolm Ashmore's (1989-16-
19) reflexive sociological study of SSK, includes Ashmore, Barry Bames, David
Bloor, Harry Collins, Nigel Gilbert, William Harvey, Jon Harwood, Karin Knorr-
Cetlna, Bruno Latour. Michael Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Michael Mulkay
Andrew Pickering, Trevor Pinch, Jonathan Potter, David Travis, Steve Woolgar
and Steven Yearley. Of course, conjuring up a network or school and naming its
main members is problematic. As Ashmore himself recognized, other names
could be added to his list. Candidates would include Wiebe Bijker, Michel CalIon
David Edge, ]ohn Law, and Brian Wynne. Conversely, some of the people
on the list might not classify themselves as part of SSK. For example, m an article
published after Ashmore's study, Lynch (1992) distinguishes between SSK
and his own program of ESW (ethnomethodological studies of work in sciences
and mathematics) ,
Furthermore, the term "SSK" is now somewhat out of date. Given the subsequent
"turn to technology" and "practices" in what was originally known as
"science studies" (Pickering 1992; Woolgar 1991a), the subfield might better be
called SSKP or SSKT. Many outsiders also refer to the group not as SSK but as
"constructivists"; however, the term "constmctivism" or "social constmctivism
is not universally accepted within the group and there are many people not
affiliated with SSK who accept some version of the social construction of knowledge
and technology or the co-construction of technoscience and society. Within
the SSK point of reference, constructivism or social constructivism may refer
more narrowly to the programs associated with Michael Mulkay and his students
as well as with continental Europeans such as Knorr-Cetina and Latour.
As the attentive reader has already noticed, almost all the SSK members
are men. Most are British; a few are from other countries, mostly in western
Europe. Corridor talk of the interdiscipline suggests that many of them have
scientific or technical backgrounds, and several passed through the British
polytechnics rather than the elite Oxbridge system[h3]. I have heard that their apparent
proclivity toward theory, programs, and acronyms was influenced by
their socialization in the polytechnics, but it is also similar to the use of jargon
in philosophical circles. Their non-elite background has sometimes been used to
explain their hostility to the traditional philosophy and history of science of the
elite universities. I have heard the suggestion that the entire debate between
SSK and the traditional philosophies of science is shaped by the cultures of the
British class system; a similar dynamic may be at work in the US in the opposition
between STS programs, which are often housed in technical universities,
and the more traditional history and philosophy of science programs.
Certainly the SSK social scientists view themselves as radicals, if only epistemological
ones, and in the 1970s and early 1980s they were the Young Turks of
the sociology, philosophy, and history of science. Overtime it seems, the Young
Turks have become silverbacks (to mix metaphors) and they now find themselves
occupying what is in some ways a conservative position with respect to
the increasingly international, diverse, and politicized field of science and technology
studies.
Corridor talk or folk sociological theorizing on SSK can only go so far; it
soon runs into the problem of internal diversity that undermines generalizations
of the type made in the previous paragraphs. Perhaps a better way of
generalizing about SSK is to say that its members share a belief that knowledge
and artifacts are socially shaped or "socially constructed," a central rubric that,
as a kind of Burkean God term, might best be left undefined. In addition to
the belief in some version of the social shaping or construction of knowledge
and technology, one often encounters a shared origin narrative that positions
the SSKers against several Others, usually positivist/Popperian philosophers,
internalist historians, and institutional sociologists of science (sometimes erroneously
lumped together as "Mertonian" and sometimes with overtones suggesting the
vulgarity of ugly American empiricism). These Others all would
and do contest the SSK narrative. Furthermore, the SSK origin narrative varies
from person to person and from context to context, and those variations constitute
significant rhetorical resources that mark internal identities. For the purposes
and space limitations of this essay, however, I construct one narrative that
gives an overall flavor of SSK. If pressed, I could locate shreds and patches of this
narrative throughout the SSK literature.
An SSK Narrative
In the 1920s and 1930s Kari Mannheim (1966) extended the project of a sociology
of knowledge as it had been handed down from ancestors such as Marx,
Durkheim, and Weber. However, Mannheim suffered a loss of nerve and ruled
out social studies of the content of science (in other words, its theories, facts,
methods, and so on). In subsequent decades Robert Merton (1973) built a sociology
ofscience that focused on institutions and social structure but left the content
in a black box. Merton assumed that the knowledge-production process was
governed by the institutional norms of universalism, communality, organized
skepticism, and disinterestedness, and by technical norms such as a concern
with evidence and simplicity. In effect, he saw the content of knowledge production
as objective and asocial, and he left theorizing about content to the
philosophers.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) helped pave the
way for the new sociology of science in the form of SSK by stirring up waves in
the philosophy and history of science. However, Kuhn soon backed away from
the radical philosophical implications of his research, and today many regard
him as something of a traitor to his own cause who may have even impeded the
development of a thoroughly sociological approach to the study of scientific
knowledge. Several researchers (e.g., Restivo 1983) also argued that Kuhn's work
was similar to that of Merton in fundamental ways and not nearly as revolutionary
as some had claimed. Nevertheless the black box of content had been
opened, and soon the new sociologists of science were finding other, more reliable
precedents. For example, Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific
Fact (1979) is now seen as a precursor to Kuhn, and SSK researchers often
point to a tradition of conventionalist accounts of knowledge within the philosophy
of science. Most frequently mentioned is the controversial Duhem-Quine
thesis of underdetermination, which holds that theories can be maintained
in the face of contradictory evidence provided that sufficient adjustments are
made elsewhere in the whole theoretical system (e.g., Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay
1983:3).
In the 1970s a group of primarily British sociologists completed the dismantling
of the legacies of Mertonian sociology and positivist/Popperian philosophy.
For example, Barnes and Dolby (1970), Mulkay (1976), and others showed
the nonnormative nature of Mertonian norms; Collins (1975) showed how replication
rested on social negotiation; and in Knowledge and Social Imagery, first
published in 1976, Bloor (1991) articulated the "strong program" in the sociology
of scientific knowledge. Thus, by the mid-1970s sociology of science had witnessed
a dramatic shift from the Mertonian paradigm to the SSK paradigm.
The narrative of a dramatic rupture or paradigm shift has been hotly contested.
Institutional sociologists of science have pointed out that the dismantling
of Mertonian norms began with a paper by Merton (1957) that marked the
transition to reward and stratification studies in the American sociology of science
The May 1982 issue of Social Studies of Science was devoted to a debate between
Merton's student Thomas Gieryn and the SSKers over the extent to which
the strong program was new or worth pursuing. Likewise, in "The Other Merton
Thesis," Zuckerman (1989) argued that Merton's early work on Protestantism
and science anticipated constructivism in his discussion of shifts of foci of inquiry
and problems within and among sciences. Philosophers of science were
even more contentious: many argued that the new sociology of scientific knowledge
did not have the revolutionary philosophical implications sometimes
claimed for it; rather, SSK led to a radical relativism and philosophical incoherence
(e.g., Hull 1988; Laudan 1990).
At the heart of the strong program were four controversial principles:
(1) causality: social studies of science would explain beliefs or states of knowledge;
(2) impartiality: SSK would be impartial with respect to truth or falsity, rationality
or irrationality, or success or failure of knowledge (and, presumably,
technology); (3) symmetry: the same types of cause would explain true and false
beliefs, and so on (in other words, one would not explain "true" science by referring
it to nature and "false" science by referring it to society); and (4) reflexivity:
the same explanations that apply to science would also apply to the social
studies of science.
The symmetry principle is probably the most important tenet of the strong
program. Bijker (1993), following Woolgar (1992), has characterized the intellectual
history of the sociology of science in terms of progressive extensions of
the symmetry principle: from Merton's symmetry between science and other social
Institutions to Bloor's symmetry between types of content to later developments
that argue for symmetry between science and technology, the analyst
and analyzed, humans and machines, and the social (context) and technical
(content).
An early version of empirical research related to the strong program was interests
analysis, associated with Bames, MacKenzie, and (at that time) Pickering
and Shapin. They, like Bloor, were at Edinburgh and are sometimes referred to
collectively as the Edinburgh school. The interests studies explained historical
controversies in science by reference to interests ranging from the Habermasian
to the more identifiably Marxist conflict of classes. In several of the more notable
studies, the scholars explained two rival theories by referring them to two
conflicting social networks that in turn were related to class antagonisms (see
Bames and Shapin 1979; Bames and MacKenzie 1979).
The interests approach soon encountered a number of criticisms even
from within networks that were broadly friendly to the SSK project. From the
perspective of laboratory- or interview-oriented methods, the historical studies
of the Edinburgh school suffered from problems of interpretation. In Chubin
and Restivo'S (1983:54) phrase, interest theory seemed to explain "everything
and nothing-and [did] so retrospectively." Perhaps even more damaging
was a detailed criticism from Woolgar (1981b:375), which included the memorable
complaint that science studies had almost returned to the original sin of
Mertonianism except that "instead of norms we have interests." A debate
erupted in the STS journals, after which discussions of class interests took on a
decidedly retro flavor (Bames 1981; Callon and Law 1982; MacKenzie 1981,
1983,1984; Woolgar 1981a, 1981b; Yearley 1982). The debate is significant because
today the analysis of how class or macrostructural interests shape the
technical content of science and technology has largely disappeared from the
SSK agenda. Instead, the concept of interests survives in a slightly different form
via the actor-network analysis of how scientists and other actors can create interest
in their work, to be discussed below.
Another of the early empirical research programs is sometimes called the
Bath school. In effect, the Bath school is Harry Colllns, but it is also associated
with his collaborator Pinch and his student Travis. Collins accepted the symmetry
principle of the strong program but was less enthusiastic about some of the
other principles (Ashmore 1989). His "empirical program of relativism" (EPOR)
postulated three stages for the analysis of controversies: (1) documenting the
"interpretive flexibility" of experimental results, that is, showing how a number
of positions were possible among the "core set" of actors in a scientific controversy;
(2) analyzing the mechanisms of "closure," or showing how the core set
came to an agreement, such as through a social process of negotiation of replication;
(3) relating the mechanisms of closure to the wider social and political
structure, a problem that Collins (1983) tended not to tackle and instead relegated
to Edinburgh-style interests analysis. Subsequently, Pinch and Bijker
(Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; cf. Bijker 1993) extended EPOR to technology
via the "social construction of technology" (SCOT) program that posited a similar
series of stages moving from "relevant social groups" to "stabilization."
A third area of research in SSK involved field studies of laboratories, sometimes
called "laboratory ethnographies" and usually associated with constructivism
proper. Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life, first published in 1979,
introduced a number of significant new concepts. Perhaps most influential was
the analysis of fact construction as a rhetorical process that involves increasing
deletions of markers of the social origins of the fact. In other words, the idea of
a fact can be interpreted as a deletion of "modalities" that qualify a given statement.
Facts were then viewed as historical outcomes of a process of movement
across "types" of facts ranging from conjectures that are connected to specific
people and contexts to anonymous, taken-for-granted knowledge of the sort
that is found in textbooks or that everyone merely assumes to be true. As facts
move from the former to the latter, the connection with their producers and social
contexts is progressively deleted. The study also developed the related "splitting
and inversion" model of the discovery process, in which "discoveries" were
invented, then split from their inventors, and finally inverted to be seen as products
of a real, natural world rather than the social world of their inventors. Furthermore,
the study presented a modification of economic models of scientific
behavior that saw scientists as investors of credibility and reapers of credit.
Knorr-Cetina's Manufacture of Knowledge (1981) developed the idea of the
construction of knowledge in somewhat different terms. She used the metaphors
of fabrication and manufacture to portray the constructed nature of the "discovery"
process in the laboratory. She pointed to the locally situated nature of
knowledge production, in which inquiry and products were "impregnated" with
indexical and contingent decisions. She also presented a critique of the concept
of scientific communities as well as of market models (for which the "market"
Involved similar assumptions about a community) and posited the Idea of
trans-sclentlfic fields.
Mulkay and students such as Gilbert, Potter, and Yearley developed a related
area of SSK known as "discourse analysis" (e.g., Mulkay, Potter, and Yearley
1983). Their studies demonstrated how scientists' accounts of their actions varied
considerably overtime and across genres or registers (such as conversations,
letters, and reports). As a result discourse analysts could destabilize accounts of
science that rested on one type of Informant's account, such as reports or biographies.
They also argued that by falling to study the full range of variability
of participants' accounts, social scientists would naively take over native accounts
and make them their own. At least some of their destabilizing studies
were directed at fellow SSK accounts from Edinburgh and Bath.
Other students of Mulkay, most notably Woolgar and Ashmore (1988), developed
the "reflexive" tenet of the strong program. Essays in the reflexivist vein
attempt to Inscribe the constructed nature of constructivist accounts In their
texts. The more theoretically interesting reflexive studies have turned constructivism
back on itself to explore philosophical and theoretical paradoxes. Ashmore
(1989), for example, did meta-analyses of attempts to replicate Collins's
replication finding as well as variable accounts of discourse analysts regarding
the variability of scientists' discourse. Woolgar (1983,1988b) explored the paradoxes
of what he called the "reflective" or naive view of the relationship between
scientists' accounts and the out-thereness of reality, which SSK researchers
rejected only to have it reappear in their practice. As in some discussions of
reflexivity in anthropological fieldwork, the theorization of reflexivity In SSK
tended not to consider reflexivity in broader social terms that include the relations
between discursive communities (Hess 1991,1992).
The actor-network approach of Callon and Latour returns, in a sense, to the
naturalistic flavor of the earlier Bath and Edinburgh studies (see Callon 1980,
1986; Callon and Law 1982; Latour 1983,1987, 1988). Actor-network analysis
views the truthfulness of knowledge and the success of technology as the outcome
of processes of social negotiation and conflict that involve marshaling resources
via sociotechnical networks that in turn produce changes in society.
Thus, unlike social constructivism, in which the context of society (either macro[h4]
or micro) shapes the content of science and technology, the actor-network
analyses point to the "seamless web" or co-construction of technoscience and
society. (This form of analysis may therefore be better termed "constructivism"
in contrast to "social constructivism.")
The political process of knowledge/technology construction is conceptualized
through yet a new set of terms, which in a very rough and preliminary
way can be glossed as follows: the problematization of the issues that forces
others to go through one's own network as an "obligatory passage point"; the
interessement of other actors that locks them into roles defined by one's own program;
enrollment strategies that interrelate the roles that one has allocated to
others; and the mobilization of the spokespersons of the relevant social groups to
make sure that they continue to represent or control their constituencies (Callon
1986). Networks are heterogeneous conglomerations of "actants": people,
institutions, and things, all of which have agency in the sense that they generate
effects on the world. In general, the concept of heterogeneous networks has
been highly influential, although American social historians of technology are
more likely to refer to a similar theorization by Thomas Hughes. Hughes's work
brings yet another concept to the study of networks: the concept of "reverse
salients," or bottlenecks that stall the expansion process (see, for example,
Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987).
A much misunderstood point, which Callon clarified in a conversation with
me, is that his framework does not ascribe agency to things but instead focuses
on the ways in which agency is attributed or delegated to things. In this way he
provides a counterargument to the criticism I raised with him that his theory involves
a version of reification, commodity fetishism, or even animism (see also
Latour 1992). To the extent that actor-network analyses do indeed examine attributions
of agency, the framework provides a point of contact with a cultural
perspective more familiar to anthropologists, because the analysis of attributions
in case studies could be tilted in the direction of a methodology that enters
into the cultural world of the people involved. By studying the historical processes
by which people grant nonhumans a degree of agency, such as conferring
the legal status of the person on a corporation, it is possible to bring out the
critical potential of Callon's approach to agency.
Through the actor-network approach, the SCOT program, and other developments,
SSK has diversified in recent years toward the study of technology
and of science in society. As a result, SSK has come closer to issues that are of
concern in "post-Mertonian" American sociology of science (e.g., Cozzens and
Gieryn 1990; Nelkin 1992) as well as the "social worlds" approach of the American
sociology of Anselm Strauss. Students of the latter approach have creatively
blended their own sociological tradition with SSK frameworks (see Clarke
and Fujimura 1992; Fujimura 1992). Likewise, American ethnomethodologists
have produced careful analyses of conversation and texts that have led to collaboration
and dialogue with the discourse analysis/reflexivist tradition within
SSK (Lynch 1985; Lynch and Wcolgar 1985). Some philosophers, such as Steve
Fuller (1993), who edits the journal Social Epistemology, have also developed a
dialogue with SSK. The expansion of SSK and fuzziness of the boundaries is evident
in Pickering's edited volume Science as Practice and Culture (1992), which
even includes an American feminist and anthropologist, Sharon Traweek
(1992). It is to the question of anthropology and ethnography, and its construction
within SSK, that I now turn.
Theorizing Knowledge: The Anthropologist as Resource
In a book review in Current Anthropology of an "anthropological" study of science,
the sociologist Steve Wbolgar (1991b:79) asks, "What is 'anthropological'
about the anthropology of science?" Although he admits that the ethnography
under review repairs some of the "descriptive inadequacies" of the laboratory
studies, he finds that it lacks "theoretical purchase." Woolgar then defines his
own version of an approach that is recognizably "anthropological," which I
shall outline later in the essay. Although I am not entirely comfortable with
Woolgar's definition, I am here interested less in disputing his argument than
in the phenomenon of a British sociologist writing in an American anthropology
journal and telling us what anthropology is, using as text or touchstone a
book in the "anthropology" of science that was written by Australian researchers
who may not be anthropologists themselves.
To understand the phenomenon, it is necessary to begin with the point that
anthropologists are latecomers to STS conversations. Of course there is a long
and rich history within anthropology of studies of material culture, ethnoknowledges,
culture and medicine, technology and evolution, magical and rational
thought, and the social impact of technology in the development context.
However, it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that anthropologists in significant
numbers began to study contemporary, cosmopolitan science and technology
and to take part in the interdisciplinary STS conversation. In contrast, in
SSK there is a relationship with anthropology and ethnography that dates back
to the 1970s. The role of anthropology/ethnography in the construction of SSK
is another important aspect of STS that anthropologists and cultural studies
scholars will soon encounter, and it warrants further inspection because the possibilities
for misunderstanding are very high.
One early example of anthropology as a resource in SSK appears In "Homo
Phrenologicus: Anthropological Perspectives on an Historical Problem," by
Steven Shapin (1979a). As occurred with the Annales school, the (then) "Edinburgh-
school" historian borrowed anthropology to write better history. (I put
"Edinburgh-school" in quotation marks because Shapin did his graduate work
at Penn, where, according to my colleague and Penn graduate Tom Carroll, faculty
and graduate students were combining anthropology and history independently
of the Edinburgh school.) Why use anthropology to do a better history or
sociology of science? Shapin answered as follows: "Cultural anthropologists
have not been so frequently or so deeply committed to the forms of culture they
have studied as have historians of science." Anthropologists might question the
attribution of a lack of commitment; many of us in some way have shown deep
commitment to political issues in the countries where we have lived. However,
Shapin seems to be thinking less of anthropology's politically engaged side than
of the image of the cultural relativist as a neutral, outside participant observer
who, like an extraterrestrial, tries to make sense of radically different ways
of life. Shapin therefore draws on a version of anthropology that could help historians
to escape from their hagiographic tendencies; it could help them to
think about science and technology as profane--that is, as not set apart from
society.
What was Shapin's anthropology? He turned to the British school of Horton,
Firth, Beattie, and Douglas, and he examined their different positions on the
relationship between social structure and ideas, including both neo-Frazerian
intellectualism and versions of functionalism. He then articulated those positions
with a framework informed by Barnes's (1977) development of interest
theory. The result was a sensitive portrait of the relationship between nineteenth-
century Scottish phrenology and Scottish society. SSK researchers today
would probably fault the essay for the unproblematic use of interest theory or
the unproblematized division between knowledge and society. Anthropologists
reading the essay today might fault Shapin for remaining within the narrow
confines of British social anthropology without exploring alternatives posed by
American cultural anthropology, French structuralisms, or other anthropological
research traditions. Nevertheless, the essay remains a competent application
of anthropological theory to a history of science problem, especially for the time
when it was written. Furthermore, because Shapin located the heterodox science
in a historical context of changing class relations, he made it possible to put on
the agenda macrosociological issues involving class and power. Those questions
have been largely lost in a number of subsequent strands of SSK research.
Another way in which anthropology entered into the construction of SSK
involved more explicit uses of the principle of cultural relativism. Collins's empirical
program of relativism, for example, used the term "relativism" as a heuristic
to signal his stance of neutrality in the face of opposing native (scientific)
views of true and false knowledge. That usage certainly was similar to cultural
relativism, although when applied to science it can be interpreted as endorsing
epistemological relativism. In general, the impartiality and symmetry principles
of the strong program came to be associated with anthropology's principle
of cultural relativism. As Woolgar and Ashmore (1988:18) noted, "The
espousal of a relativism traditionally associated with cultural anthropology enabled
the social study of science to treat the achievements, beliefs, knowledge
daims, and artifacts of subjects as socially /culturally contingent."
As a resource, then, not only did anthropology provide a theory of knowledge/
society relationships (as in the Shapin paper), it also provided a metaphor
of cultural relativism to aid in the application of the principles of the strong
program. By imagining sciences as foreign cultures and themselves as anthropologists,
sociologists and historians were able to describe their relativist position-
epistemological, cultural, moral, or otherwise-regarding the content of
scientific knowledge. At the same time, however, SSK researchers tended to be
fuzzy on distinctions among the types of relativism, and consequently they became
vulnerable to criticisms from philosophers who insisted that at least some
variants of SSK self-destruct in the contradictions of social idealism and epistemological
skepticism. (On the types of relativism and their relationship to constructivism,
see Hess 1995:chap. 1; 1997b:chap. 2.)
Anthropology also served as a resource for SSK in the more general sense of
providing a metaphor for the excitement that the SSK researchers felt as intellectual
pioneers in the study of the content of science and technology. They became
heroic explorers of test-tube jungles. For example, Latour and Woolgar
began their classic Laboratory Life (1986:17) with an anthropological metaphor
that Is found throughout the SSK literature:
Since the turn of the century, scores of men and women have penetrated
deep forests, lived in hostile climates, and weathered hostility, boredom,
and disease in order to gather the remnants of primitive society. By contrast
to the frequency of these anthropological excursions, relatively few
attempts have been made to penetrate the intimacy of life among tribes
which are much nearer at hand.
Armed with their colonialist and masculinist metaphors, much in the tradition
of Carolyn Merchant's (1980) portrait of Francis Bacon, the SSK researchers were
ready to "penetrate" the secret of the content of science that Merton, like a good
Puritan, had left modestly covered.
Anthropology also provided a method or, more accurately, a metaphor of
method. Indeed, this use of anthropology came to displace the theoretical use
as seen in Shapin's essay (1979a), and "anthropology" came to be synonymous
with "ethnography." For example, in Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar developed
the argument that historical studies (such as the Edinburgh school interests
research) suffered from the limitation of having to rely on scientists' own
statements about their work. An anthropology of science as a form of "ethnographic"
observation provided a better alternative:
Not only do scientists' statements create problems for historical elucidation;
they also systematically conceal the nature of the activity which
typically gives rise to their research reports. In other words, the fact that
scientists often change the manner and content of their statements
when talking to outsiders causes problems both for outsiders' reconstruction
of scientific events and for an appreciation of how science is
done. It is therefore necessary to retrieve some of the craft character of
scientific activity through in situ observations of scientific practice. (Latour
and Woolgar 1986:28-29)
Thus, whereas historical studies suffered from the problem of having to rely
heavily on scientists' own retrospective accounts, in the laboratory studies sociologists
were able to observe for themselves the unmasked and unclothed content
of science.
In Science: The Very Idea, Woolgar (1988b:84) explained in more detail what
the ethnography of science involved as a method. Usually, the ethnographer
takes a menial position in the laboratory and works there for eighteen months
until becoming "part of the day-to-day work of the laboratory." In other words,
in the Malinowskian tradition, one comes in off the library veranda of archives
or surveys and instead lives with a people for a sustained period of time. Woolgar
described the ethnographer's task as one of note-taking, interviewing, and
collecting documents. Those descriptions of ethnographic method are likely to
be familiar to anthropologists; however, another aspect of Latour and Woolgar's
construction of ethnographic method, the stranger device, is apt to be less so.
In Laboratory Life as well as in Woolgar's Science: The Very Idea, Latour and
Woolgar were concerned that laboratory culture was too familiar, a problem
that anthropologists who work in cultures unlike their own are less likely to face.
Because of the cultural proximity of scientists and SSK researchers, Latour and
Woolgar became preoccupied with going native and accepting uncritically the
accounts of scientists about their work. In order to demonstrate the social construction
of knowledge, Latour and Woolgar wanted to achieve distance from
the sciences and scientists under study, and they appealed to the idea of "anthropological
strangeness" for that sense of distance. They cited as their theoretical
inspiration a 1944 essay by the phenomenologicol sociologist Alfred
Schutz (1971). Although in Science: The Very Idea Woolgar (1988b:84) noted
that "'ethno-graphy' means literally description from the natives' point of
view," he added that the scientists' point of view "must be perceived as strange."
"just as in any good anthropological inquiry," Woolgar wrote, "the ethnographer
of science must bracket her familiarity with the mundane objects of study
and resist at all times the temptation to go native" (1988b:86). The hoped-for
result was a demystification of science. As Latour and Woolgar (1986:29) wrote,
"Paradoxically, our utilization of the notion of anthropological strangeness is
intended to dissolve rather than reaffirm the exoticism with which science is
sometimes associated."
For anthropologists who study non- or semi-Western cultures and who have
been, like me, confronted with practices such as spirits who perform surgery,
achieving a sense of strangeness or distance is not a problem. Rather, the trajectory
tends to be in the opposite direction: to take ideas and practices that
educated Westerners would describe as irrational and show how they form a coherent
system once the different set of assumptions is understood. However, that
trajectory is only half the journey. As Marcus and Fischer emphasize in Anthropology
as Cultural Critique (1986), understanding other cultures provides a vantage
point for critical inspection of the values and assumptions of Western
culture (including modem science). In contrast, Laboratory Life starts with an assumed
rationality for Western science, then exoticizes it through the stranger device,
and finally reveals a gap between the assumed rationality of the scientists'
self-representations and a non-rational or other-rational practice that is revealed
through observation. Rather than showing the hidden rationality of the
scientific Other, Latour and Woolgar show the hidden irrationality of the scientific
Self.
In the other laboratory studies, different aspects of anthropology as ethnography
served as a resource. Knorr-Cetina (1981) used anthropology to help pose
an alternative to the "frigid" methodologies of data collection in sociology and
psychology (a metaphor that, like her use of "impregnated" above, I flag in
contrast to "penetration" to suggest possible feminist resonances in her work).
The frigid methods, Knorr-Cetina argued, rely on the questionable assumption
that the meanings of scientists' language can be taken at face value. In their
place she called for a more sensitive sociology that would achieve "an intersubjectivity
which does not as yet exist." She suggested that this more sensitive
sociology could "be found in a return to the anthropological method of participant-
observation," and she described the history of anthropology as involving
"progressive attempts to establish intersubjectivity at the core of the ethnographic
encounter" (Knorr-Cetina 1981:17).
Collins and Pinch (1982) articulated a similar view in their "ethnography"
of science, Frames of Meaning. They began the introduction to their book with a
discussion of the rationality debate. Framed in terms of a "relationship between
different cultures" that are likened to Kuhnian paradigms, the distance between
the social scientist and the scientist is likened to a divergence between two cultures.
Like Knorr-Cetina and unlike Latour and Woolgar, Collins and Pinch
viewed the problem as one of achieving understanding across different scientific
cultures rather than going native by taking scientists' statements at face value.
Collins (1994:383) also showed concern with the stranger device and the means
by which "ethnographers" of science may obtain an "estranged viewpoint."
For Collins and Pinch, the problem was not achieving strangeness and distance
but instead achieving competence in another scientific culture. Achieving
competence in turn involved both practical and theoretical difficulties. As a
practical problem, the jobs of both the sociologist and the scientist are full-time
positions that require years of socialization. As a theoretical problem, the sociologist
never becomes an entirely native member of the other scientific discipline
and consequently may be prevented "from understanding native
members both by virtue of his untypical array of competences and by virtue of
his position as sociologist/outsider with regard to the native community"
(Collins and Pinch 1982:20). Sustained fieldwork in the culture of the scientific
Other was the solution proposed by the Bath school, which espoused an interpretive
sociology that in some ways was reminiscent of Geertzian cultural interpretation
(Collins 1981). As in Geertzian cultural Interpretation, the Bath
school's position did not imply that the goal was to accept uncritically scientists'
accounts as their own; understanding the Other's world was instead a prerequisite
to a more theorized account of that world (cf. Mulkay, Potter, and Yeariey
1983; reply by Pinch and Collins in Collins 1983).
To summarize, the understanding of anthropology, ethnography, the
ethnographer-informant relationship, and related concepts was by no means
uniform across the various members and texts of the S.SK school. Their understandings
also changed over time. For example, Latour (1990a: 146) admitted
that the first laboratory ethnographies, including his own work, "used the most
outdated version of anthropology." Likewise Woolgar (1982,1988a, 1988b:91-
95; Woolgar and Ashmore 1988) drew on subsequent discussions related to the
"new ethnography" in anthropology, including the SAR seminar that produced
Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), to advance his own version of reflexive
ethnography as the "second generation" of the ethnography of science that
would replace the older "instrumental" ethnography. (Our current SAR seminar
may someday be seen as an exemplar of yet another generation of ethnographic
studies of science and technology.)
In Leviathan and the Air Pump, Shapin and Schaffer (1985) also showed some
significant developments in comparison with Shapin's (1979a) essay on phrenology.
They opened the historical study of Boyle and Hobbes with a distinction
between the accounts of "members" of a culture and those of "strangers."
In order to move away from self-evidence, they followed Latour and Woolgar in
contrast to Collins and Pinch. They noted that in Laboratory Life Lotour and
Woolgar were "wary of the methodological dangers of identifying with the scientists
they study." Their position contrasted with that of Collins (1981:6), who
argued "that only by becoming a competent member of the community under
study can one reliably test one's understanding." Shapin and Schaffer (1985)
argued that "we need to play the stranger," because the stranger to the experimental
culture is in the position of "knowing" that there are alternatives. Finally,
after noting that "of course we are not anthropologists but historians,"
Shapin and Schoffer provided a method for playing stranger to the experimental
culture.
At a theoretical level, Leviathan and the Air Pump deconstructs the laboratory/
society division in ways similar to Latour's post-Laboratory Life work on
Pasteur (Latour 1983, 1988). Shapin and Schaffer show that Boyle was building
not only a laboratory and an experimental method but also a new type of society
that recognized a boundary between science and society. The argument is
consistent with actor-network theory in general and with Latour's emphasis on
the laboratory as a site for the coproduction of science and society. Latour
(1990a) subsequently returned the favor to Shapin and Schaffer in a book
review of Leviathan that called for an anthropology of science "without anthropologists."
The review marks what is perhaps the final step in the SSK construction
of anthropology and ethnography. In the review, Latour leaves the
impression that SSK has done such a good job of appropriating anthropology
that, as Modleski (1991) argues is the case for constructions of feminism without
women, anthropologists are no longer necessary or interesting. Anthropology
without anthropologists.
I will close this section with a simple question: Did they get it? Notwithstanding
all the internal differences and the changes over time, there is a way
in which the SSK laboratory studies and some of the related historical studies
can be seen as a unity. This unity or doxa has to do with how those studies are
all likely to appear "strange" to anthropologists who read them for the first
time. As several other anthropologists have commented to me, when we read
SSK laboratory "ethnographies" or the "anthropology of science" we have a
sense that we are not reading ethnography or anthropology at all. For example,
for me the question of whether one is a stranger or insider is less interesting than
how the fieldwork begins to unravel connections among various cultural domains: